🌊Diving into Learning: Our Ocean Inquiry, ANZAC Reflections & More!

Kia ora whānau,

What a fantastic and busy term we’ve had in Te Pūawai! 🌱 Since our last update, we have been diving deep into our learning about 🌊 Our Oceans, exploring Healthy Oceans, Our Moana in Aotearoa, Kaitiakitanga, and Making a Difference. Through this inquiry, we have learned about 🦈 marine reserves, 🐙 sea creatures, 🦐 marine food webs and chains, 🌿 seaweed species, and—most importantly—the impact and influence we, as humans, have on our moana.

As we move into the final two weeks of the term, our focus will shift to ANZAC Day 🇳🇿🇦🇺, ensuring our tamariki understand the significance of this important commemoration, which takes place during the upcoming school holidays.

In ✍️ Writing, we recently reviewed our 🎡 school gala, reflecting on the highlights of this exciting event. To extend our digital skills, we explored 🎨 Canva to publish snippets of our reviews, which we have shared on our individual blogs.

Looking ahead to Term 2, we hope to begin our mahinga kai learning 🌱—provided Ranginui 🌧️ blesses us with some much-needed rain to end our current drought!

📖 Reading Reminder: Please encourage your tamariki to read every night to build their reading mileage! They have access to 📚 ReadWorks and 📖 ReadTheory, which offer a range of passages and articles to help expand their general knowledge and strengthen their comprehension strategies.

➗ Mathematics Focus: We will continue with a strong number focus next term. So far, our Year 4️⃣ students have been working with three-digit numbers for addition and subtraction, while our Year 5️⃣ students have extended their learning to numbers up to 10,000. We have also covered 🔢 identifying, reading, writing, ordering, and comparing numbers, along with estimating sums and differences and using addition and subtraction strategies with and without regrouping.

⚽🏉 Sports Update: This term has been packed with sporting events, including football festivals ⚽ and rippa rugby tournaments 🏉. Our students have demonstrated outstanding determination and sportsmanship at these events—ka mau te wehi! 🎉

🗣️ Te Reo me Tikanga Māori: We have been exploring pūrākau 📖 connected to our school pou 🏛️. Over the holidays, we encourage students to continue working on their pepeha/tātai rangatira 🌿, as we will be focusing on presenting these in Term 2 to our class and syndicate.

🍎 Food for Thought Nutrition Programme 🥦

This term, we were lucky to take part in the Food for Thought nutrition programme, which ran over three sessions with Whaea Melissa. Our tamariki learned how to read nutrition labels, explored the different food groups, discovered how much sugar is hidden in our drinks, and discussed ways to make healthy choices about what we consume. To wrap up our learning, we were fortunate to receive a gift card to organise our own class morning tea 🍽️—a delicious way to celebrate the end of a busy term!

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Whānau Welcome! As always, whānau are welcome to visit our class at any time. Thank you for your ongoing support—we look forward to another exciting term of learning ahead!

Ngā mihi,
Te Pūawai 🌿

Halfway Highlights

Te Puāwai – Term 1 Highlights!

Kia ora whānau,

It’s been a busy and exciting term for Te Puāwai, and we’re excited to share some of the awesome learning and activities we’ve been part of so far!

🖤 Te Tiriti o Waitangi Learning & Class Trip
In Week 2, we had an amazing trip to Te Ahu Museum and Library as part of our learning about Te Tiriti o Waitangi. This year, we have been focusing on the history of Te Tiriti in our own local area. We’ve explored who was involved in writing, translating, and signing Te Tiriti, as well as the different perspectives of those who supported or opposed it. It’s been great to dive deep into this important part of our history!

💦 Water Safety Programme
Our class has just completed the Top Energy Water Safety Programme, where our tamariki gained some essential skills to stay safe in and around water. This was a fantastic opportunity to grow confidence and awareness while having fun!

🎨 Toi Oho – Creative Learning
Our Toi Oho sessions are in full swing! Some students have been working with Whaea B and Matua Anaru, while others have been with Whaea Deb and Whaea Jade, supporting Te Manga as tuakana. It’s been wonderful seeing our students embrace their creativity and leadership in these sessions.

✍ Creative Storytelling in Writing
This term, our writing focus has shifted from explanation writing to narratives. The students have been getting creative, learning about the structure of a good story, developing characters, and describing settings in detail. We can’t wait to share some of their amazing stories soon!

🌱 Mahinga Kai & Sustainability
Our mahi in the mahinga kai has been on hold due to the hot summer sun—it’s just been too warm to work outside! But we’re looking forward to preparing our garden beds and getting back into planting in early Term 2. In Week 3, Whaea Kathy from CBEC visited us to teach us about composting and worm farming, so we’re now ready to create our own right here at kura!

🏉 Rippa Rugby Skills
We’ve also been getting active with Timara from Northland Rugby, who has run two Rippa Rugby skills sessions with our class. This has helped us get tournament-ready for the upcoming games at the end of the term!

It’s been an incredible term so far, and there’s still plenty more to come. Keep an eye out for photos of our adventures!

Ngā mihi,
Te Puāwai 🌿✨

🌱 Garden Update – Week 6 🌱

Kia ora e te whānau! Our garden has come a long way since we started from seed in Week 2! We’ve been busy growing peas, beans, courgettes (zucchini), and cucumber from seed, while our tomatoes—kindly gifted by Mrs. Hall as seedlings—are thriving. We also have silverbeet, spring onions, lettuce, and a selection of herbs joining the garden family. However, our lettuce seems to be disappearing, and we suspect rabbits might be enjoying it as much as we hoped to!

Last week, some of our tamariki used bamboo, bailing twine, and cable ties to build a support (sturdy or not?) for our peas. We’ve also set up garden stakes for the beans and are planning a trellis for the cucumbers using waratahs and fencing mesh. With any luck, some of our produce will be ready for a harvest feast before the school year ends!

Check out our photos below to see the garden’s amazing progress. 🌞🌱🐰

Na, Te Puawai tamariki

A Busy Start to the Week in the Garden and on the Field!

We kicked off our week with a productive morning in the mahinga kai (school garden)! Tamariki got stuck into weeding, prepping the garden beds, and planting our seedlings. At the end of last term, we sowed pea, bean, zucchini, and telegraph cucumber seeds, and today they found their home in the garden.

Lunchtime saw the launch of our first PAL (Physical Activity Leaders) game of Stuck in the Mud, run by April, Cameron, and Nova. With a fantastic turnout, they split the game into juniors and seniors, making it accessible for everyone. Afterward, they reflected on what worked well and what could be improved, with great ideas already flowing for the next game. We can’t wait for more fun this week!

Term 4 Takeoff: Action-Packed Week of Learning, Leadership, and Fun!

Wow, what a start to our final term! We’ve been buzzing with a visit from Massey University’s research team for Healthy Active Learning, some tamariki have completed questionnaires, and others are wearing wristbands to track their physical activity over the next week.

On Monday, we kicked off with a twist—turning our holiday highlights into snappy newspaper articles, complete with catchy headlines and AI-generated images. Check out some of the finished pieces below!

The kids loved getting outdoors for afternoon athletics practice with Te Manga and Te Kauru, and we wrapped up the week with a Kapa Haka session led by Matua Hori, prepping for our end-of-year prizegiving.

A big shout-out to our ten new Physical Activity Leaders (PALs) who will start running lunchtime games and activities next week. Those who missed out this time will have a chance next year. Check out our new PALs in the photo below!

 

Te Hiku Film Festival 2024

The movies have been played on the big screen at the Te Ahu Cinema in Kaitaia on Wednesday 11 September 2024. This is one of the lucky movies to be chosen from our school. Congratulations to everyone involved in the production of this movie. Please click on the link to view other Te Hiku Films. Please enjoy and feel free to leave a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment below for the students.

Rippa Rugby and Parafed

Kia ora whānau

Last week was a busy one for Te Puawai.  We were incredibly lucky to have two manuhiri to add to our kete.  First we had Bodean visit on Tuesday to teach us about rippa rugby, we played some fun and engaging warm up games then we paired up for some drills before finishing with a whole class game.  Our class are very keen to have Bodean back again in the future.

Thursday we were very fortunate to have Parafed visit to run a session using a variety of sports equipment that are specifically designed for people with disabilities.  There was so much variety and something for everyone to enjoy.  Games were the finisher for this session as well and we extend our gratitude to Whaea Pele and Whaea Jonelle from Parafed, also to Whaea Alysha for organising this on our behalf.

 

School Values

Kia ora e te whānau o Te Puawai

This week we have started our learning on explanation writing.

Today we watched a couple of videos and had a class kōrero about what explanation writing is.

Next we split into five groups to work collaboratively, each group had one school value to focus on.  The task was to explain what each value means and write examples of demonstrating this value at Paparore School.

Our next learning step was to choose the one school value they feel most strongly about and to independently write a paragraph explaining what that school value means and specific examples they have seen in action at our kura.  Once we have written our paragraphs we revisit our writing process of recrafting, editing and then publishing.

Here are some photos of our collaborative task which was our planning for our writing.

Can you share any examples of our school values being demonstrated that you have seen?